ERP Evidence on Processing Adverbs and Verb Inflections by the Korean EFL Learners

Our study is to investigate whether or not the Korean EFL learners rely more on adverbs than verb inflections in collateralness to the previous studies when they process English sentences with verbs and adverbs. As we checked their responses on an ERP experiment, we found some significant results that N400 appeared at the verb position either preceding the adverbs or following when both incongruent and congruent constructions are compared and P600 slightly at the verb position when the verb-adverb constructions are congruent and incongruent. It revealed that even though the Korean EFL learners seem to rely on the lexical meaning in determining the verb inflections, they try to process them syntactically and are affected by L1 of Korean. Along with a result of this aspect, we claim that there should be some universal operating properties in processing adverbs and verb inflections in languages.